Learning and Ethology Flashcards
Clark Hull’s Drive Reduction Theory (theory of motivation)
Suggested that the goal of behavior is to reduce biological drives; that is, reinforcement occurs whenever a biological drive is reduced.
Blocking
Not only must the CS and UCS be contingent, the CS must also provide non-redundant information about the occurrence of the UCS in order for conditioning to occur.
Contingency management methods
Behavioral contract, time-out procedures, token economy, and the Premack principle.
Biological constraints
Different species have different inborn predispositions to learn different things in different ways.
Niko Tinbergen
Introduced experimental methods into the field of ethology, enabling the construction of controlled conditions outside the laboratory.
Sociobiology
Studies how various social behaviors increase fitness, and most associated with E. O. Wilson. It is considered to encapsulate modern ethology.
Discriminative stimulus
A stimulus condition that indicates that the organism’s behavior will have consequences (e.g., only giving pellets to a pigeon when they press the lever AND the light is on; this light here is the discriminative stimulus).
Flooding
One way of exposing clients to their irrational fears (e.g., having a client with a cat-phobia, hold a cat, and after learning it is harmless, the phobia may be extinguished.)
Implosion
A way of exposing clients to their irrational fears (e.g., having the patient imagine the fearful situation, and by learning that nothing happens, the person can extinguish the phobia).
Systematic desensitization
Uses a hierarchy of anxiety-producing situations combined with the use of relaxation techniques (e.g., while in a deeply relaxed state, participant imagines the gradual anxiety producing situation in the hierarchy). When the relaxation responses are reinforced to the anxiety-invoking stimulus, this is called “counter-conditioning”.
Tolman’s Cognitive Map
The mental representation of a physical space, most associated with rats’s cognitive map of a maze.
Innate releasing mechanism
The mechanism in an animal’s nervous system that serves to connect the stimulus (e.g., fish seeing red belly fish) with the right response (e.g., attacking the fish).
